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Piloting Tips for Wipeout 64

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while it's true that we have no records tables for WO64, fans of this version may still appreciate knowing all the tricks and tips, so please post any that you want to share here in this thread. please do not post questions or comments on this thread, but start a separate thread for discussion, otherwise the tips may get so spread out it'll be hard to find them amongst the discussion, whereas finding both the tips and the separate discussion of the one you're interested in should be easy.
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Bumping ships is taking very much of your speed away, avoid it wherever possible. If you use a turbo and then bump some enemies back, it was useless. How to be careful about that:
1. In the finish lane don't drive in the middle, particularly when you are going fast - ships always drive in the middle, just hold left or right to avoid and overtake them easily (on the finish lane you almost always meet an enemy ship).
2. Rather miss pads instead of bumping into an enemy. If you see a speedpad with an enemy that you would bump into if you tried to take it then just don't take the pad. Also if it is a weapon pad. Mostly useless trying - important when you are going for gold in a no-weapon-race.

Find out how you can do the curves. There are some curves you are forced to use airbreaks at to manage them (e.g. the last curve on velocitar in my opinion). I try to avoid using airbreaks very often because they can take away speed if you hold them for too long. It often is enough to hit the airbreak for a second to change direction nicely.
1. Test where you can avoid airbreaks, try only steering.
2. Also be careful at the speed type: on phantom you have to use it quite often, on vector you can just steer and get the tightest curves right.

Save the autopilot. If you get an autopilot, don't use it right away, keep it until a hard part on the track, it will be useful. The autopilot can get you through passages that humans are not able to do, you can go towards a hard curve at fullspeed and activate it a second before you would crash into the wall and you will still make it through.
1. The autopilot only deactivates when the ship is going straight forward again, not in a curve. Find out where the places are to activate the pilot - you can be clever and let it steer for you for about 10 seconds sometimes (e.g. active it when you just did the big jump on sokana and it will get you through the hard passage until the last curve of the lap).
2. Don't use the autopilot on easy things because it doesn't go full speed. If you are going along the last part on klies bridge you better ditch it because it only steals you time. And don't use the autopilot when you know you will be ending up in a slalom run - so don't use it at the finish line of velocitar, you will be getting crashed into the walls in the slalom tunnel at the beginning.

Weapon bias. The weapon generator is much more biased in this game than in any other. When you approach first place, expect lots of mines and shields and nothing else, even when you're not in first place yet and need an actual weapon to overtake. You may want to hang on to an electrobolt or thunder bomb or turbo boost to grab or defend first place, especially in challenges with superfast opponents.

Don't use autopilot after an electrobolt warning. If the electrobolt hits you while you're in autopilot mode, you slow down to a near stop until either the electrobolt or the autopilot times out. This can easily ruin your race.

Klies Bridge Phantom with Feisar
The most important things are:

> Don't swerve all over the place, and try to take corners sharply. Any speed up located at the outside of a bend should be approached from the centre of the road. (This applies especially to the one at the crest of the first hill, which I'm convinced they put there to make you drift to the outside and lose time)

> Critical section 1: cutting the 90° left hander at the bottom of the hill. Pull up immediately after going over the crest and fly across the terrain. The straight section after the turn is long and slow, so you absolutely have to skip some of it or you'll die of old age before you reach the tunnel. Unlike on Talon's Reach, this doesn't involve flying through buildings and violating stick2trax, so feel free to ignore the official track layout.

But don't get greedy and attempt to skip half of the track. The Feisar isn't a Piranha, all you'd achieve is a hard landing followed by an uncontrolled dive into the tunnel. Also, do not attempt to break the long distance flight record. Taking a shortcut is fine, but get back onto the track without delay. The Feisar will stay afloat for about a second without losing speed, but then it stalls and falls down like a brick, killing your lap time. This is very important.

> Critical section 2: take the long wide left hander as tightly as possible, then as soon as the right wall drops away, turn hard right and use your second turbo! By using your turbo here, you can stay under turbo power until you're almost at the line. Don't wait too long to activate the turbo, or you'll crash at the upcoming bend.

The final bend can be a bit tricky because you're going very fast and are likely to hit the outside wall, the pitlane divider, or end up swerving all over the place. The bend itself is short and sharp, so a short tap of the button will suffice. Just be sure to do so very early; and hope you come out on the left side of the track. Oversteering here causes you to swerve and lose all of your turbo speed.

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If you do both right, you get a lap time between 18.5 and 19.0 seconds. From there, work on nibbling off a few tenths of a second here and there until you can consistently do 18.3 laps. At that point, it's just a matter of doing so a few dozen times until you get lucky and everything happens to go your way...

note by Lance: We need more than a video; some people have only dial-up. Please add a text description of the tip.

Sorry dialuppers! You must be on dialup lance?
When using a Pirhana (sp?) on Klies Bridge, on the first curve before the tightsh turn, keep the nose up. You will launch into the air and will be able to steer your craft over many competitors, over the tight turn and into the straight before the checkpoint. (I once went to 1st place on first lap doing this but crashed on a later part of the track )
You can take a shortcut through the snowy mountain after, as there is no collision detection. Hold the nose up and sail through the mountain, cutting the corner, and saving a small fraction off your time. Sometimes though, its more risk than reward.

You may have noticed that the AI drones will pick up supersonic speeds and just jet ahead of you at the jump, even if you overtook them before and have taken all the speed ups along the way. It isn't unusual for an AI to turbo boost, but this seems a glitch in the AI speed setting for this track section. (They make up for it by slowing down to a Vector crawl at the starting grid)

An autopilot turns your ship into a drone (complete with slowdown effect when an electrobolt hits you), which acts the same as a regular drone but is slightly faster.

If you were to use an autopilot at the exact point where the AI speeds up...

This trick actually works; using an autopilot just as the track starts to even out after the long bend gives you a huge speed boost and launches you off the ramp at AI speeds. Depending on the ship, this may even be faster than a turbo boost!

The timing is a bit tricky; too late and you don't get the speed boost, too early and you slow down first before boosting, way too early and the autopilot disengages when your ship levels out.

This worked for me:I know my lap record sucks. I don't like this track.

Oh, and hit the discard button to cancel the autopilot when you approach the hairpin, or it disengages right in front of it and there's no way in hell you can make it through in one piece.

One trick i always use to get great times, is to use the up and down buttons to your advantage. This takes a lot of practice. But you can use it to above the track and use it to cut hard corners. This usually only works on phantom.

A good place to practice is the first real turn on Klies Bridge. Just as you get to the top, just before dipping fown to the 90 degree turn, hold down and left and try to manouver yourself to go on the inside of the turn and land just before the cave.